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1
 THE HUMAN BRAIN
ITS CAPACITIES AND FUNCTIONS
 
Isaac Asimov 
 
ContentsIntroduction xiii
1 Our HormonesORGANIZATIONSECRETIN AMINO ACIDSSTRUCTURE AND ACTIONMORE POLYPEPTIDE HORMONES2 Our PancreasDUCTLESS GLANDSINSULININSULIN STRUCTUREGLUCAGONEPINEPHRINE3 Our ThyroidIODINE THYROXINE THYROID-STIMULATING HORMONEPARATHYROID HORMONEPOSTERIOR PITUITARY HORMONES4 Our Adrenal CortexCHOLESTEROLOTHER STEROIDSCORTICOIDS ACTH5 Our Gonads and GrowthPLANT HORMONESGROWTH HORMONEMETAMORPHOSIS ANDROGENSESTROGENSGONATROTROPHINS6 Our NervesELECTRICITY AND IONS THE CELL MEMBRANEPOLARIZATION AND DEPOLARIZATION THE NEURON ACETYLCHOLINE7 Our Nervous SystemCEPHALIZATION THE CHORDATES THE PRIMATES APES AND MEN8 Our Cerebrum THE CEREBROSPINAL FLUID THE CEREBRAL CORTEXELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHY  THE BASAL GANGLIA  THE HYPOTHALAMUS9 Our Brain Stem and Spinal Cord THE CEREBELLUM THE CRANIAL NERVES THE SPINAL NERVES THE AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM10 Our Senses TOUCHPAIN TASTESMELL11 Our EarsHEARING THE EXTERNAL AND MIDDLE EAR  THE INTERNAL EAR ECHOLOCATION THE VESTIBULAR SENSE12 Our EyesLIGHT THE EYEBALL WITHIN THE EYE THE RETINA COLOR VISION13 Our ReflexesRESPONSE THE REFLEX ARCINSTINCTS AND IMPRINTINGCONDITIONING14 Our MindLEARNINGREASON AND BEYONDPSYCHOBIOCHEMISTRY  A Final Word
 
 
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Chapter 1Our Hormones
ORGANIZATION
Even primitive man felt the need for finding some unifying and organizing principle about hisbody.
Something moved 
the arms and legs, which of themselves were clearly blind tools and nothing more. A natural first tendency would be to look for something whose presence was essential to life. An arm or leg could be removed without necessarily ending life; or even diminishing its essence,however it might hobble a man physically. The breath was another matter. A man just deadpossessed the limbs and all the parts of a living man but no longer had breath. What is more, to stopthe breath forcibly for five minutes brought on death though no other damage might be done. And,to top matters off, the breath was invisible and intangible, and had the mystery one would expect of so ethereal a substance as life. It is not strange, then, that the word for "breath" in various languagescame to mean the essence of life, or what we might call the "soul." The Hebrew words
nephesh and ruakh, the 
Greek 
 pneuma,
the Latin
spiritus and anima 
all refer to both breath and the essence of life. Another moving part of the body which is essential to life is the blood; a peculiarly living liquidas breath is a peculiarly living gas. Loss of blood brings on loss of life, and a dead man does notbleed. The Bible, in its prescription of sacrificial rites, clearly indicates the primitive Israelite notion(undoubtedly shared with neighboring peoples) that blood is the essence of life. Thus, meat must notbe eaten until its blood content has been removed, since blood represents life, and it is forbidden toeat living matter. Genesis 9:4 puts it quite clearly: "But flesh with the life thereof, which is the bloodthereof, shall ye not eat."It is but a step to pass from the blood to the heart. The heart does not beat in a dead man, andthat is enough to equate the heart with life. This concept still lingers today in our common feeling that all emotion centers in the heart. We are "broken-hearted," "stouthearted," "heavyhearted," and"lighthearted."Breath, blood, and heart are all moving objects that become motionless with death. It may bean advance in sophistication to look beyond such obvious matters. Even in the earliest days of civilization, the liver was looked upon as an extremely important organ (which it is, though not forthe reasons then thought). Diviners sought for omens and clues to the future in the shape andcharacteristics of the liver of sacrificed animals.Perhaps because of its importance in divining, or because of its sheer size-it is the largest organof the viscera-or because it is blood-filled, or for some combination of these reasons, it began to bethought by many to be the seat of life. It is probably no coincidence that "liver" differs from "live" by one letter. In earlier centuries, the liver was accepted as the organ in charge of emotion; and the best-known survival of that in our language today is the expression "lily-livered" applied to a coward. Thespleen, another blood-choked organ, leaves a similar mark. "Spleen" still serves as a synonym for a variety of emotions; most commonly anger or spite.It may seem odd to us today that, by and large, the brain was ignored as the seat of life; or asthe organizing organ of the body. After all, it alone of all internal organs is disproportionately large inman as compared with other animals. However, the brain is not a moving organ like the heart, it isnot blood-filled like the liver or spleen. Above all, it is out of the way and hidden behind a closeconcealment of bone. When animals, sacrificed for religious or divining purposes, were eviscerated,the various abdominal organs were clearly seen. The brain was not. Aristotle, the most renowned of the ancient thinkers, believed that the brain was designed tocool the heated blood that passed through it. The organ was thus reduced to an air-conditioning device. The modem idea of the brain as the seat of thought and, through the nerves, the receiver of sensation and the initiator of motion was not definitely established until the 19
th
century.By the end of the 19th century, the nervous system had come into its own, and actually intomore than its own. It was recognized as the organizational network of the body. This was the easierto grasp since by then mankind had grown used to the complicated circuits of electrical machinery. The nerves of the body seemed much like the wires of an electrical circuit. Cutting the nerve leading from the eye meant blindness for that eye - cutting the nerves leading to the biceps meant paralysisfor that muscle. This was quite analogous to the manner in which breaking a wire blanked out aportion of an electrical mechanism. It seemed natural, then, to suppose that only the nerve network 
 
 
3
controlled the body. For instance, when food leaves the stomach and enters the small intestine thepancreas
is
suddenly galvanized into activity and pours its digestive secretion into the duodenum. The food entering the intestine is bathed in the digestive juice and digestion proceeds.Here is an example of excellent organization. If the pancreas secreted its juices continuously that would represent a great waste, for most of the time the juices would be expended to no purpose.On the other hand, if the pancreas secreted its juices intermittently (as it does), the secretions wouldhave to synchronize perfectly with the food entering the intestine, or else not only would thesecretions be wasted but food would remain imperfectly digested.By 19th-century ways of thinking, the passage of food from the stomach into the smallintestine activated a nerve which then carried a message to the brain (or spinal cord). This, inresponse, sent a message down to the pancreas by way of another nerve, and as a result of thissecond message the pancreas secreted its juices. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that, rather unexpectedly, the body was found to possess organization outside the nervous System.
SECRETIN
 In 1902 two English physiologists, William Maddock Bayliss and Ernest Henry Starling, werestudying the manner in which the nervous system controlled the behavior of the intestines and of theprocesses of digestion. They made the logical move of cutting all the nerves leading to the pancreasof their experimental animals. It seemed quite likely that the pancreas would fail to secrete digestivejuices at all, once the nerves were cut, whether food passed into the small intestine or not. That was
not 
 what happened, to the surprise of Bayliss and Starling. Instead, the denervatedpancreas behaved promptly on cue. As soon as food touched the intestinal lining, the pancreas beganpouring forth its juice. The two physiologists knew that the stomach contents were acid because of the presence of considerable hydrochloric acid in the stomach's digestive secretions. They thereforeintroduced a small quantity of hydrochloric acid into the small intestine, without food, and thedenervated pancreas produced juice. The pancreas, then, required neither nerve messages nor food,but only acid; and the acid needed to make no direct contact with the pancreas itself but only withthe intestinal lining. The next step was to obtain a section of intestine from a newly killed animal and soak it inhydrochloric acid. A small quantity of the acid extract was placed within the bloodstream of a living animal by means of a hypodermic needle. The animal's pancreas reacted at once and secreted juice,although the animal was fasting. The conclusion was clear. The intestinal lining reacted to the triggeraction of acidity by producing a chemical that was poured into the bloodstream. The bloodstreamcarried the chemical throughout the body to every organ, including the pancreas. When the chemicalreached the pancreas it somehow stimulated that organ into secreting its juice.Bayliss and Starling named the substance produced by the intestinal lining 
secretin 
(see-kree'tin;"separate" L), (In this book I shall follow the practice initiated in
The Human 
 ) since it stimulated asecretion. This was the first clear example of a case in which efficient organization was found to beproduced by 
means 
of chemical messages carried by the bloodstream rather than electrical messagesof the nerves. Substances such as secretin are in act sometimes referred to rather informally as"chemical messengers."
*Body 
of giving the pronunciations of possibly unfamiliar words. I shall also include the
meaning of 
the key word from which it is derived with the initial - L, indicating the derivation to be from the Latin and G indicating it to be from theGreek. In this case, the derivation from "separate" refers to the fact that a cell forms a particular substance and separatesthat substance, so to speak, from itself discharging it into the bloodstream, into
the intestines, or upon 
the outer surface of thebody. A secretion is thought of as being designed to serve a useful purpose, as, for instance, is true of the pancreatic juice. Where the separated material is merely being disposed of, it is an
excretion 
("separate outside" L); thus urine is an excretion.
 The more formal name was proposed in 1905, during the course of a lecture by Bayliss. Hesuggested the name -
hormone 
("to arouse" G). The hormone secreted by one organ, you see, wassomething that aroused another organ to activity. The
name 
 was adopted, and
ever since it 
has beenquite clear that the organization of the body is built on two levels: the electrical system of brain,spinal cord, nerves, and sense organs; and the chemical system of the various
hormones 
and
hormone- colaborating organs.
  Although the electrical organization of the body was recognized before the chemicalorganization was, in this book I shall reverse the order of time and consider the chemical
of 00

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